


regret/hope

by georgina_bulsara



Category: Giri/Haji (TV)
Genre: (kind of), F/M, Missing Scene, between episodes 7 and 8, kind of an internal monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26361097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/georgina_bulsara/pseuds/georgina_bulsara
Summary: Sarah pours herself a glass of wine, lights a joint, and thinks about the ripples of chaos all around her
Relationships: Kenzo Mori/Sarah Weitzmann
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	regret/hope

**Author's Note:**

> I know there's zero audience for this, but I just had to get it down after watching Giri/Haji last month. I wish there was more fic for this fandom, but I don't think I could really do it justice, so I'm just offering this little one-shot with the possibility of writing similar ficlets for other characters later on. I just love all the characters so much!
> 
> note: this takes place right before the final episode, so spoilers if you haven't seen it! and if you haven't seen it and you like crime drama with an enormous dose of found family, watch Giri/Haji on netflix!

Sarah poured herself a glass of wine. Lit a joint. Put a record on and swayed about the living room in her downy dressing gown. She felt light and carefree, as if in a dream, even though she knew the feeling would be short-lived. That the reality of her situation would come crashing down sooner or later—sooner, if the day’s events were any indication. 

Kenzo had called her back, long after the voicemail she’d left him had lost its relevance. He had his own bad news to share reluctantly from the inside of her car while the rain thudded down with such force that she could hear it even over the line. Yuto was on the run, the yakuza had touched down in London and were looking for him. Steve, Sarah’s boss, would be escalating the efforts to find Yuto, given the fact that the detective had spent several hours tied up in the back of the car. Kenzo didn’t know where Taki was, except that she was with a girl named Annie and had instructed him not to bother calling. He also didn’t know where his wife and mother were because, back in Japan, they’d somehow ended up on the run from the yakuza with Yuto’s infant son and his mother. 

Sarah listened to Kenzo as he unloaded each of these new developments, speaking more than perhaps she had ever heard in the time she’d known him. Once he’d run out of things to say, he asked about Ian and how she’d managed to sort it all out with him. 

Sarah had tried not to cry, choking back tears as she recounted the reconciliation with Ian followed by the horrid events precipitated by Rodney’s misjudged attempt to help. 

Rather than comment on just how fucked everything was, Kenzo’s reply had been steady and reassuring. “Sarah, I am going to bring your car back. Stay there, and I will be there soon.” 

By now, Kenzo would be back in his room at SVU, hopefully with Taki or at least with a message from her saying that she was OK. 

Sarah finished off her glass of wine and resisted reaching for her phone. The calmness from seeing Kenzo was starting to wear off, replaced with restlessness and a nagging sense of culpability. 

The web she’d become ensnared in would eventually coil back around to further consume her, she was sure of it. In some respects, she felt truly powerless. She’d never intended for Ian to get hurt, and what had happened to him was going to haunt her forever. Although neither she nor Rodney had physically pushed him into the path of an oncoming car, she couldn’t fight off the guilt that hovered in the back of her mind. 

Was it not one of her actions, some decision she made long ago, that had brought Ian to that fate? Which decision of hers was it, turning him in last year? Following him that day he went to plant evidence? Pressuring him to do things in bed (or out of it) that perhaps pushed him towards Joyce? If Sarah hadn’t gone to see him today, to try to convince him not to turn her in for sheltering a murderer, wouldn’t he still be alive? 

Somewhere along the line, her good intentions had been corrupted. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much that they’d been corrupted, as they had been shifted to a slightly different moral centre. She was no longer trying to do the right thing as defined by her job description, nor was she acting from a position of jealousy that had pushed her, before, to do the “right” thing. Sarah didn’t quite understand her motives anymore, but she knew that it wasn’t good and bad, black and white. It was complicated, complicated enough that she wasn’t able to reason for herself or explain it to anyone else. She just knew what she could and couldn’t do, and she couldn’t turn the Mori brothers in. 

When the needle hit the end of the record, Sarah switched off the turntable and retreated to her bedroom. The bed was perfectly made, no trace of Kenzo having been there not 45 minutes ago. The tiny bloodstains from Yuto’s home surgery had been successfully rubbed out of the bedspread with the help of hydrogen peroxide—if the police came around, they wouldn’t find any DNA evidence of the Mori family in her home. 

Sarah flopped onto the bed, suddenly feeling very tired, although she knew there was no chance of her falling asleep any time soon. If she did fall asleep, it would be fitful. Her dreams would manifest nightmarish scenarios of how everything could go more wrong than it already had, or they would provide her with a false sense that everything was fine, and she’d wake up disillusioned and anxious. 

Everything seemed out of her control. She couldn’t control what other people did, nor how they reacted to her. She’d made decisions regarding her own actions…but often they didn’t really feel like decisions. Letting Yuto and Kenzo hide out in her house was less an active decision on her part and more a matter of coincidental factors that brought them all together. The right thing to do may have been to turn both of them in, but for Sarah it had never really been on the table. Did that make her a bad person? Did she regret any of the things she’d done to help the Mori family? What kind of ripple effect would her actions have outside of her immediate circle? 

She wondered if Kenzo felt the same way, if he questioned the motives of his actions or if he thought they were inevitable. She thought about what he’d said before he left that night – Last month, I was in Japan. My brother was dead. I was a faithful husband. Now I look around, and I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. 

Things may have changed for the worse—Sarah was almost certainly going to lose her job at the very least, Ian was dead, she didn’t know where or how Rodney was. But she found that she couldn’t really say with sincerity that she’d rather go back to how things were before, a month ago.

It made her sad that Kenzo might not feel the same way—that he regretted every decision he’d made that had brought him to her bedroom on a rainy night. That everything that had changed in his life was now a burden, something to make him feel guilty and ashamed. 

For all her inability to not keep her mouth closed, Sarah hadn’t been particularly verbose in the last several days. Everything she said seemed to be some variation of “what are we/you/they going to do?” 

What were they doing? What good could possibly come of their actions? Was it all one big mistake? The future was an enormous question mark, and Sarah felt it pressing down on her, making her restless even as she tried to calm herself by listening to the rain outside. 

There aren’t words for everything—but Sarah knew she would feel better if they tried to put words on whatever this was. She didn’t know what to say or how to say it, but she knew that she had to call Kenzo and find out… 

Can there be meaning without words? 

She picked up the phone and tapped Kenzo’s number.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr!](https://georginabulsara.tumblr.com/)


End file.
